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It has been said that Raphael Mengs was a born genius spoiled by the coldness, the pseudo-classicism, the artificiality and eclecticism of the eighteenth century. A companion portrait is Hans Makart, ruined by the amateurishness, the rhapsodizing, the theorizing, the morbid self-consciousness of the nineteenth.
Here Wagner indulges in positively uproarious satire of the pseudo-classicism and the school harmony, counterpoint and "composition" of the nineteenth century; and the music is not less ludicrous than the words. It is a parody of the very kind of music Wagner wrote in his Rienzi days, with sneers at the Jewish composers of psalms.
In some of his tragedies his classic learning was thought to be ostentatiously displayed, but this was not true of his comedy, and on the whole he was too strong to be swamped in pseudo-classicism. For his experience of men and of life was deep and varied.
The first extends from the age of discovery and exploration to the middle of the eighteenth century; the second includes the second half of the eighteenth century; the third comprises the years of the nineteenth century up to 1840, while that date inaugurates the triumph of Romanticism over pseudo-Classicism.
But that miserable article of Schumann deplorable gush that has been tolerated, nay, admired, only because it is Schumann's the evil influence of the pseudo-classicism of Mendelssohn and his followers, the preposterous over-praise of Hanslick, these things drove Brahms into the mistake never made by the really able men.
Pseudo-classicism had but few worthy representatives in Russia, if we omit the poet Derzhavin, whom Pushkin accused of having a poor knowledge of his mother tongue, and whose monotonous work shows signs of genius only here and there. As to romanticism!
He might well have added, the Renaissance and the pseudo-classicism of a later day. Beauties there are in this region, galore; and the examples which no longer exist, but of which the records tell, point to a still larger aggregate. Who thinks to-day of Coutances as of being a "cathedral town?"
It is in the Dramaturgie that Lessing first properly enters as an influence into European literature. He may be said to have begun the revolt from pseudo-classicism in poetry, and to have been thus unconsciously the founder of romanticism.
In some of his tragedies his classic learning was thought to be ostentatiously displayed, but this was not true of his comedy, and on the whole he was too strong to be swamped in pseudo-classicism. For his experience of men and of life was deep and varied.
Romanticism was a revolt against eighteenth-century pseudo-classicism, and it had its day, and did its work, and went out. Haydn did not want to revolt against classicism, nor even pseudo-classicism. In fact, in music Haydn stands for classicism, and this is no contradiction of what I have written about his throwing away the formulas of his predecessors.
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